leman.

All the principal religions in Europe stand upon one common bottom. The
support that the whole or the favored parts may have in the secret
dispensations of Providence it is impossible to tell; but, humanly
speaking, they are all _prescriptive_ religions. They have all stood
long enough to make prescription and its chain of legitimate prejudices
their main stay. The people who compose the four grand divisions of
Christianity have now their religion as an habit, and upon authority,
and not on disputation,--as all men who have their religion derived from
their parents and the fruits of education _must_ have it, however the
one more than the other may be able to reconcile his faith to his own
reason or to that of other men. Depend upon it, they must all be
supported, or they must all fall in the crash of a common ruin. The
Catholics are the far more numerous part of the Christians in your
country; and how can Christianity (that is now the point in issue) be
supported under the persecution, or even under the discountenance, of
the greater number of Christians? It is a great truth, and which in one
of the debates I stated as strongly as I could to the House of Commons
in the last session, that, if the Catholic religion is destroyed by the
infidels, it is a most contemptible and absurd idea, that this, or any
Protestant Church, can survive that event. Therefore my humble and
decided opinion is, that all the three religions prevalent more or less
in various parts of these islands ought all, in subordination to the
legal establishments as they stand in the several countries, to be all
countenanced, protected, and cherished, and that in Ireland particularly
the Roman Catholic religion should be upheld in high respect and
veneration, and should be, in its place, provided with all the means of
making it a blessing to the people who profess it,--that it ought to be
cherished as a good, (though not as the most preferable good, if a
choice was now to be made,) and not tolerated as an inevitable evil. If
this be my opinion as to the Catholic religion as a sect, you must see
that I must be to the last degree averse to put a man, upon that
account, upon a bad footing with relation to the privileges which the
fundamental laws of this country give him as a subject. I am the more
serious on the positive encouragement to be given to this religion,
(always, however, as secondary,) because the serious and earnest belief
and practice of